Armenian trainers promote European standards against discrimination

12 February 2014

On 8 February 2014 human rights defenders and lawyers were presented with certificates for completing an EU-supported human rights training course in Yerevan. The Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Union (EU), in cooperation with the Armenian Chamber of Advocates (ACA), trained 30 Armenian lawyers and human rights defenders on how to teach European standards of protection against discrimination.
Within the framework of this project, a handbook on European non-discrimination law was published in Armenian, which included a collection of theoretical and case materials, as well as the results of a topical seminar implemented in 2013. A second handbook on distance teaching is being drafted.
The head of the EU Delegation to Armenia, Traian Hristea, underlined that the EU attached importance to human rights, particularly the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was why the EU and the CoE supported Armenia in providing this necessary training.
Oleksandr Pavlyuk, Head of the Council of Europe Office in Armenia, stated during the closing ceremony that: ‘For the Council of Europe this document is a fundamental material for human rights. We are together here to conclude a very important component of this project… The chosen topic for training, in this case discrimination and anti-discrimination standards, are very much needed in Armenia. Lawyers and human defenders will find these topics highly relevant for their work’.
The lawyers and human rights defenders who completed the training will share their experiences with colleagues through a series of cascade training sessions, which will start in March 2014. These newly certified trainers will continue to train others, even after the joint CoE-EU project is completed.

Ara Zohrabyan, Chairman of the ACA, congratulated participants, noting that their certificates would qualify them to be accepted by the ACA as professional trainers.
Experienced Armenian human rights defenders took part in the training. Avetik Ishkhanyan, Head of the Armenian Helsinki Commitee for Human Rights, talked about the importance of the course as the issue of discrimination issue was not raised in Armenia enough. He went on to say that, while he was previously aware of discrimination issues, the training programme had taught him to better define types of discrimination, how to collect a database of cases, and to identify unnoticed trends in former cases.
The session was organised within the framework of the EU-CoE joint programme “Strengthening the capacity of lawyers and human rights defenders for domestic application of the ECHR and of the Revised European Social Charter”. This is a regional programme implemented in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The training session was the last in a cycle of four three-day training sessions for trainers.

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